Brisson has been charged with jealousy of, if not hostility to, the great Swede, and it is true that in the preface to his Ornithologie he complains of the insufficiency of the Linnaean characters, but, when one considers how much better acquainted with birds the Frenchman was, such criticism must be allowed to be pardonable if not wholly just.
Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that in New England his dream was the daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding.
But during the delicate negotiations which were required to secure the support of the Hungarian nobles she undoubtedly did appeal to them with passionate eloquence, and, we may believe, with a very pardonable sense of the advantage she obtained from her youth, her beauty and her sex.
Hence his mistakes though easy to understand are by no means so pardonable as were, for example, those of the Georges, who had been absolute monarchs in their own country.
Lactantius (circa 300 A.D.), for example, roundly declares that Plato and Aristotle, referring everything to this earthly life, " made virtue mere folly "; though himself maintaining, with pardonable inconsistency, that man's highest good did not consist in mere pleasure, but in the consciousness of the filial relation of the soul to God.
Like Schleiermacher he substitutes collective guilt for original sin; and he attaches great dogmatic value to the assertion that sin has two stages - ignorance, in which it is pardonable, and obduracy, when it is ripe for final sentence (probably annihilation).
Mistakes under such circumstances are pardonable.
There seems to have been at times a pardonable confusion between some quasilegitimate unions and those marriages by mere word of mouth, without ecclesiastical or other ceremonies, which the church, after some natural hesitation, pronounced to be valid.
Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness.